Questionable Harry Alan Towers

A couple of days ago, I stumbled on the decidedly ropey 1972 film version of Treasure Island on the Movie Mix TV channel. It was produced by Harry Alan Towers.

Now there was a man with a life like a movie plot.

I first heard of him years ago as a prolific and rather shady B-movie producer; I heard some of his films were set up simply to launder money internationally. In its obituary, the Independent said “he acquired a legendary reputation as the most prolific – and occasionally elusive – independent producer in the business.”

He made over 100 quickly-made films. Variety‘s obituary claimed he was “known for his sometimes questionable practices”.

Starting as a child actor, he became head of the RAF radio unit with the British Forces Broadcasting Service then, in 1946, with his mother, started a company called Towers of London which syndicated radio shows around the world. He then started producing film series like the The Adventures of The Scarlet Pimpernel (1956) which he sold to ITV in the UK.

In 1962, he started making feature films in places such as South Africa (under apartheid), Hong Kong, Ireland and Bulgaria. This was when the Cold War was at its height.

He continued producing movies well into his 80s and died in Canada, aged 89, in 2009. At the time of his death, he was working on post-production of a film adaptation of Moll Flanders directed by Ken Russell.

Stephen Ward: fall guy for Profumo scandal

The interesting year in his career is 1960. In February, he was allegedly introduced to Czech-born Mariella Novotny by ‘society osteopath’ Stephen Ward at a party held by American millionaire Huntington Hartford.

But there are other versions of what happened.

According to the November 1983 issue of Lobster magazine:

Maria and Towers didn’t meet at the party, but Towers must have recognised her: four days later a letter arrived suggesting a meeting at Claridges to discuss some possible modelling work. The letter was actually signed by Tower’s mother, Margaret, who Novotny claims had an extraordinary influence over him, and from whom he took his instructions. At the meeting Towers was brisk to the point of rudeness. He told her that he could make her a top television model doing commercials in America. Although she didn’t like Towers, she found it difficult to turn down the contract, which offered upwards of $50,000 a year. Over the next days the contract was sorted out and Maria was introduced to some of Towers’ friends, one of whom tried to have sex with her in Paris. Towers, over the next year, made no sexual advances towards Maria but didn’t mind pushing his friends on her. She signed to Towers’ modelling agency and he gave her a large deposit. 

But there are other versions of what happened.

According to Novotny herself, what happened in London was that Towers invited her to his flat to meet his mother and a group of Americans, one of whom – having asked her into another room to speak privately – promptly stripped off his clothes. “I was anxious to do well in New York,” she wrote, “so I shrugged and decided to do whatever was necessary… Neither Towers nor his mother gave any indication of knowing what we had done on our return to the drawing-room.”

Her uncle, President Antonín Novotný, in New York in 1960

Maria (Mariella) Stella Novotny was born in 1941 in Prague. The story goes that her father was brother to the President of Czechoslovakia and they lived in the Royal palace until she was 6 years old. The President supported the Communists, but Maria’s father was actively anti-Communist. The President warned Maria’s father that the Soviets were liable to arrest him and advised him to leave the country. Instead, he joined the underground, making arrangements for Maria to leave the country with a family called Rutter. They escaped in a railway truck hiding under some corn, and crossed the border into Austria.

Unfortunately, they ended up in the Soviet sector where they were put in a displaced persons camp. In 1948, Maria was released, apparently through the efforts of a Mrs Capes, who had known her father when he was a university student in England. Maria went to England, where she lived as the daughter of Mrs Capes. When she became a teenager she went into modelling and was determined to make it into a successful career.

But there are other versions of what happened.

According to Christine Keeler in her 2001 book The Truth at Last, Mariella was born in 1942 London and her real name was Stella Capes but she changed it to Mariella Novotny because it “had a more whiplash ring to it.” After the death of her father, she became a striptease dancer to support her widowed mother and worked as a prostitute in London. Christine Keeler claimed: “She was a siren, a sexual athlete of Olympian proportions – she could do it all. I know. I saw her in action. She knew all the strange pleasures that were wanted and could deliver them.”

Maria/Mariella married Horace/Hod

What seems agreed is that, aged 18, Mariella met Horace ‘Hod’ Dibden, aged 57, an expert on English antiques and furniture. They met at his Black Sheep Club in Piccadilly and got married in January 1960. Dibden was a friend of Stephen Ward.

It was Stephen Ward who may have introduced Novotny to Harry Alan Towers at the party in February 1960. He also introduced Towers to Mandy Rice-Davies (this was three years before the Profumo scandal broke).

Horace Dibden and Mariella Novotny held their own parties.

In her autobiography, Mandy (1980), Mandy Rice-Davies described what happened when she arrived at one of these parties in Bayswater:

“The door was opened by Stephen (Ward) – naked except for his socks… All the men were naked, the women naked except for wisps of clothing like suspender belts and stockings. I recognised our host and hostess, Mariella Novotny and her husband Horace Dibbins, and unfortunately I recognised too a fair number of other faces as belonging to people so famous you could not fail to recognise them: a Harley Street gynaecologist, several politicians, including a Cabinet minister of the day, now dead, who, Stephen told us with great glee, had served dinner of roast peacock wearing nothing but a mask and a bow tie instead of a fig leaf.”

Sometime that same year, Harry Alan Towers started an affair with Novotny and promised to get her work in US TV commercials. Towers flew to New York in December 1960, followed by Novotny. She later told a friend that “I wanted to be famous and show my mother that I could make a go of life myself.”

After two weeks in the US, Towers allegedly arranged a lunch for her with actor Peter Lawford, the brother-in-law of soon-to-be President John F Kennedy. She was introduced to Kennedy and later, at a party held by singer Vic Damone, almost immediately shown into a bedroom where she had sex with Kennedy. They were not gone very long before there was a commotion in the main room. Damone’s Asian girlfriend had made an unsuccessful suicide attempt and had been found in the bathroom with her wrists slashed. The apartment quickly emptied. Kennedy disappeared with his bodyguard and his associates and the incident was hushed up.

The quick departure could have had something to do with the fact that, according to Novotny, an FBI man was known to attend these parties.

Novotny being taken into custody by a rather cliché FBI man

On 3rd March 1961, Novotny was arrested by the FBI and charged with soliciting. Three days later, Towers was accused of transporting her from Britain to New York for the purpose of prostitution. It was claimed that Towers ran a call-girl ring at a New York hotel. And a call-girl ring at the UN was also mentioned.

Novotny told the FBI that, in New York, “Towers took me to the Great Northern Hotel… The following afternoon Towers brought a prostitution date to me, who paid me $40 to commit a sexual act. Thereafter I entertained prostitution dates regularly and earned approximately $400 a week. I gave Towers about $300 of this money… Towers was present when prostitution acts were committed.”

In her FBI statement, she also claimed: “Towers was a Soviet agent” responsible for “providing the Russians with information for the purposes of compromising certain prominent individuals”.

On 12th April 1961, Towers appeared before a US grand jury on five counts of violating the White Slave Traffic Act. On 25th April, he pleaded not guilty to all five charges.

By the time his trial was due to begin on 16th May 1961, he had jumped bail and fled back to Britain, then to Eastern Europe (at the height of the Cold War) where he started producing low budget thrillers financed through Liechtenstein and other tax havens.

Novotny returned to running sex parties in London, which were (according to a Guardian article in 2009) “attended by so many senior politicians that she began to refer to herself as the government’s chief whip.” The parties allegedly included British politicians John Profumo and Ernest Marples as well as foreign leaders including (allegedly) Willy Brandt and Ayub Khan.

In June, 1963, FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover wrote an internal memo on the current Profumo Scandal:

J.Edgar Hoover, dressed in men’s clothing, 1961

For information. John Profumo was British Minister of War until his recent resignation following disclosure of his relations with Christine Keeler. Stephen Ward, London osteopath, has been arrested in London charged with living on the earnings of Keeler and Marilyn Rice-Davies, prostitutes. Ward’s operations reportedly part of a large vice ring involving many people including many prominent people in the US and England including other Ministers of British Cabinet… Other individuals involved include Yevgeny Ivanov, aka Eugene Ivanov, former Soviet Naval Attache, London, who patronised Keeler and who reportedly requested Keeler to obtain information from Profumo… Horace Dibben, British citizen, in whose residence sex orgies were held is husband of Maria Novotny; Maria Novotny is prostitute who operated in NYC and was victim in white slave case involving her procurer, Alan Towers. She fled to England and has participated in orgies at Ward residence. Alan Towers… is reportedly now permanently residing behind Iron Curtain. Novotny alleges Towers was a Soviet agent and that Soviets wanted information for purposes of compromise of prominent individuals; Lord Astor of England on whose Cliveden Estate sex orgies reportedly occurred: it was here that Profumo first met Keeler; Douglas Fairbanks, Jnr, movie actor; Earl Felton, American screen writer; and many others also involved.

In 1978 Novotny announced that she had started work on her autobiography which would include details of her work for MI5. She claimed that her book would include details of a “plot to discredit Jack Kennedy”.

In 1980, all charges against Towers were dropped after he paid a £4,200 fine for jumping bail.

Mariella Novotny was found dead in her bed in February 1983. Reportedly, “Shortly after her death her house was burgled and all her files and large day-to-day diaries from the early sixties to the seventies were stolen.”

So it goes.

David Don’t and Charmian Hughes watch 50th birthday cake burst into flames last night

Comedian Charmian Hughes is married to magician David Don’t.

Today is David’s 50th birthday. Last night, he had a party in Peckham.

I ended up sitting at a table with London-based American comic Lewis Schaffer.

“How are your flaps?” I asked him.

The last time we met, he was telling me he has sleep apnea and has old-man flappy-flop flaps inside him.

“Flaps are inherently funny,” I said. “They’re like bananas. Flaps and bananas are inherently funny.”

“I’ve been using a mouthpiece,” said Lewis Schaffer. “If you want to see something inherently funny, it’s a 57-year-old man wearing a plastic mouthpiece in bed so he can sleep. It keeps my mouth open.”

“You don’t need an artificial aid,” I told him.

By this time, London-based American comedy force of nature Karen O Novak and her husband Darren had turned up.

And, by this time, the music was very loud.

I could not hear across the table.

I handed Lewis Schaffer my iPhone.

“Just talk to each other,” I told Lewis Schaffer. “I won’t hear what you talk about until tomorrow morning, but it will give me a blog. Keep up the American act.”

Lewis Schaffer took the iPhone. This morning, I transcribed what they said.

Lewis Schaffer & Karen O Novak remembered NYC  last night

KAREN: I’m one of the few people here who actually knows for a fact that Lewis Schaffer is not a caricature of a New York neurotic Jew. I actually fucking knew you in New York when you were just…

We just called you ‘The Neurotic Jew’ at that point.

LEWIS SCHAFFER: Was I mental even for New York, do you think?

KAREN: Yup.

LEWIS SCHAFFER: So was I a character even in New York, do you think? Because you, Karen, you were a character in New York too.

KAREN: I think we’re all characters in the great big…

LEWIS SCHAFFER: No, Karen. You were a memorable person even then. You were over the top. And you weren’t even a Jew. You were like a fake Jew.

KAREN: I’m Jew… ish.

LEWIS SCHAFFER: You gotta come up with a better joke than that.

KAREN: I’m Jew by injection. I kept my first husband’s Jewness. I got it in the divorce.

LEWIS SCHAFFER: What town did you grow up in?

KAREN: Roxbury, Connecticut.

LEWIS SCHAFFER: Where’s that near?

KAREN: It’s near a lot of Jews. Stephen Sondheim lives there.

David Don’t in Beatles’ suit, behind an unknown woman, outside Ladies toilet

LEWIS SCHAFFER: Were you like me? People think my family had money when I was growing up, but we never had money.

KAREN: We had money.

LEWIS SCHAFFER: Did you inherit any of it?

KAREN: They’re not dead yet.

LEWIS SCHAFFER: I think your husband Darren loves you even without the money.

KAREN: He would have to.

LEWIS SCHAFFER: Yeah, he would have to, cos you’re very annoying. I say that as a misogynist and a woman-hater.

KAREN: You’re very good at both those things.

LEWIS SCHAFFER: I like the idea of women.

KAREN: You like the shape of them. The curvy squishiness…

LEWIS SCHAFFER: Even that can get on your nerves.

KAREN: … not so much the brainy part.

LEWIS SCHAFFER: A lot of my friends are women. I actually respect women. You know that about me, Karen.

David Don’t tries to remove Lewis Schaffer’s bra (Don’t asked)

KAREN: I know that.

LEWIS SCHAFFER: That’s what people can’t believe. I actually spend a lot of time with women talking about how much I hate women.

KAREN: You spend a lot of time with women without your penis out. Probably the women insist on that.

LEWIS SCHAFFER: My penis doesn’t come out. It’s an ‘innie’. How long have you lived in Britain?

KAREN: About 15 years.

LEWIS SCHAFFER: Same as me: 13 years.

KAREN: I don’t have any English children, though.

LEWIS SCHAFFER: John says I’m not allowed to discuss why I’m here on a Saturday night. I was supposed to have the kids tonight, but the mother is punishing me for not loving her.

KAREN: If it was me, I would punish you FOR loving me. You are SO not worthy.

LEWIS SCHAFFER: That’s why you’ve kept Darren around for so long. That’s the key to keeping a man happy. I say to women: “When you make love to a man – right after he reaches orgasm – you should slap him in the face and say: Get off me, you disgusting pervert.”

KAREN: That IS what I do.

Lewis Schaffer asks Darren a question in Peckham last night

LEWIS SCHAFFER: (TO DARREN) Is that what she does?

DARREN: But I AM a disgusting pervert, so that’s fair enough.

LEWIS SCHAFFER: (TO KAREN) You probably think about going back to New York every day?

KAREN: Never. I like New York. I miss my friends there. But I don’t miss the city. The city itself is a shit hole.

LEWIS SCHAFFER: But you had a lovely apartment. It had a garden.

KAREN: We used to have some great parties in that flat.

LEWIS SCHAFFER: Did he make a good living: your first husband?

KAREN: Why on earth would I have a husband who didn’t make a decent living? I’m not an idiot.

LEWIS SCHAFFER: Are you calling my ex-wife an idiot? Is anyone who has sex with me an idiot?

KAREN: Pretty much, yeah.

LEWIS SCHAFFER: I think so too. I like this. We’re almost having a little relationship here.

KAREN: I think we could do a podcast.

LEWIS SCHAFFER: You were on my radio show.

KAREN: Yeah, but we didn’t get a good rapport going because there were too many other people there. And we weren’t nude.

LEWIS SCHAFFER: That was the early days when the shows weren’t very good. They’ve gotten better now. I’m a more generous host. That’s the key.

KAREN: Are you a generous lover? That’s the key. When you make love to a woman, you have to give and give and give.

LEWIS SCHAFFER: I bring her an extra portion of fish. What does it mean to be generous?

KAREN: Exactly. You don’t even know what it means to be generous in bed.

Lewis Schaffer and Karen discussing relative values last night

LEWIS SCHAFFER: I DO know what it means and I AM generous because, the more I give a woman, the less she has to pay attention to me, the less she’ll notice how I don’t care, how I’m unable to get an erection. How, even when I get an erection, it’s not noticeable.

KAREN: You got an ‘innie’?

LEWIS SCHAFFER: I got an ‘innie’.

KAREN: It’s more like a vagina, really, than a penis?

LEWIS SCHAFFER: Yeah. It’s like a penis, only smaller. Is your husband a generous lover?

KAREN: He’s very generous. He gives me his paycheck every month.

LEWIS SCHAFFER: (TO DARREN) How much do…

KAREN: (TO ME) You know what? John Fleming should write his own blog. He just talks to other people and then writes it down.

LEWIS SCHAFFER: That’s what he does. He’s gotten so lazy.

ME: Have you given me a good blog? Have you mentioned Lewis Schaffer’s flaps?

LEWIS SCHAFFER: I’ve got an ‘innie’.

ME: What?

LEWIS SCHAFFER: I’ve got an ‘innie’.

Adrienne Truscott kisses her Soho Theatre poster yesterday

New York-based Adrienne Truscott is performing her show at London’s Soho Theatre until the end of the month. She performs naked from the waist down. The title is:

ADRIENNE TRUSCOTT’S ASKING FOR IT – A ONE-LADY RAPE ABOUT COMEDY STARRING HER PUSSY AND LITTLE ELSE!

“I understand,” she told me at Soho Theatre yesterday, “some people could see the title and think Who is this gimmicky, cheeky woman trying to make light of rape?”

“Is it a gimmick?” I asked.

“It’s a gimmick,” said Adrienne, “but one which has some weight to it because, in theory, if I’m on stage with my pants off and my make-up on and I’m two or three gin & tonics in in a roomful of people then – on a certain level by the logic that it’s discussed in our culture – I am ‘asking for it’… And it HAS happened that someone’s got raped in a room full of people and no-one did anything to stop it.

Wau Wau Sisters’ image for their new show Death Threats

I saw the show’s first night at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe.

This year, Adrienne is taking it back to Edinburgh for a limited 8-day run at Bob & Miss Behave’s Bookshop as well as performing as half of the Wau Wau Sisters in a 17-day run of their new show Death Threats (and Other Forms of Flattery).

“Your mother came to see your opening night at the Soho Theatre last week,” I said. “Had she seen Asking For It in New York?”

“I’ve barely done it in the States.”

“How did she react last week?”

“The best part was I could hear her laughing during the show. Afterwards, she said: I thought it was brilliant, love.”

“She’s American?”

“She’s from Exeter.”

“So you’re half English?”

More than half English, part wild West Country girl Adrienne

“I’m more than half English. My father’s American, but his father is from Cornwall. My mother moved to the States when she was 20.

“I lived over here for a little bit when I was seven, after my parents got divorced – St Austell in Cornwall, but I spent most of my time around Exeter and Devon.

“My grandfather is from Fowey and his father was a ship’s captain. My sister is a writer. She’s currently working on a historical novel. She’s written a lot of poetry in her time.”

Adrienne’s father is an academic specialist on the writings of the Italian poet Dante.

“My family,” Adrienne said, “are not showbiz. They’re not chomping at the bit to get on the stage.”

“Your mother has seen the Wau Wau Sisters presumably?” I asked.

“Yes.”

There is a video on YouTube of the Wau Wau Sisters performing their show The Last Supper in Australia.

“So your mother is used to nudity and dodginess and sexuality?” I said.

“I wouldn’t say she’s used to any of that. She’s seen the shows and she sort of gets I’m doing it from a different place than that other tawdry version.”

“The Wau Wau Sisters are tawdry?” I asked.

“I feel that we’re insistently tawdry. It’s not that we’re called tawdry. We announce that we’re tawdry, though we have a lot of slyly political fun with being tawdry and being naked. My mother sort-of gets that this Asking For It show is smart-tawdry but that doesn’t mean it makes her any more comfortable. My mum is not entirely comfortable with me running around taking my clothes off, but she sort of understands the reasons.”

“Had you decided you’d had enough of the Wau Waus?” I asked.

“Not at all. We’re still Wau Wauing.”

The Wau Wau Sisters – both Vow & Wow

“You pronounced that with a V,” I said. Vau Vau not Wau Wau.”

“Yes,” said Adrienne, “Vow-Vow Sisters.”

“It’s German?” I asked.

“It comes from a Brecht character named Mr Wau. We were given the name because someone watching us found us to be somewhat Brechtian and because this character Mr Wau is a strongman in a circus and is followed around by a band of freaks. So we, with the help of this friend, sort-of imagined us like the bastard daughters of Mr Wau.”

“So what’s the point of writing a one-woman show on rape?” I asked. Because it’s going to have an effect?”

“First and foremost,” said Adrienne, “I thought it was interesting material. I’m not saying, Right! That’s my show! We can put rape to bed. That won’t be happening any more. I just wanted to contribute to a conversation that I felt was lacking.

Adrienne Truscott in Soho Theatre bar in London yesterday

“It started writing itself in my head and then I realised it was quite topical. I was writing it before all the rape show shenanigans started last year. I had been thinking about How can you use comedy to talk about rape in a smart way? and then, as I was working on it, it became as much about What are the rules and pitfalls and structures of comedy? and then, while I was working on it, all this Rape Joke controversy blew up last year.

“In the States, it turned into an election year, so there was a lot of crazy politics going on. It was getting kinda zeitgeisty and that’s when I thought Fuck! I’m going to take it to Edinburgh NOW – Now is the time to comment on this!

“Because?” I asked.

“I’ve never been satisfied with the way rape is discussed. Even organisations and ad campaigns I still felt took the wrong approach and still talked about it in an annoying way.”

“Annoying in what way?” I asked.

“Talking about victims. One origin of the show – but not the only one – was I was in a very small class at university: it was sort of a race gender class.”

“How very American,” I said.

“My professor was a man and he was trying to get us a bit riled-up by shocking us with statistics. Amongst many statistics about race and pain inequity, he said 2 in 5 women are sexually assaulted or raped. There were about 13 or 14 people in the class – about 10 women. He said: Doesn’t that get you riled-up? It means in this class at least 4 women have been raped? How does that make you feel? and he asked why we weren’t responding. I told him: Partly, we’re not responding because we’re shellshocked and feel weird and uncomfortable. I would like to know – because there are two male students and you in this class – which one of you is a rapist? Let’s talk about you guys. Literally if, statistically speaking, you’re talking about a closed group and you’ve announced some of us got raped, then one of you three had to partake in it. So you’re fucking guilty. Let’s talk about that instead of the ‘victims’… And I think that’s a really potent conversation to have.”

“How did he react?”

“He found himself at a loss for words, just like we had been.”

Adrienne Truscott’s one-woman bottomless show

“The interesting thing in Edinburgh last year,” I said, “was that the word got round very, very quickly that it was a serious piece of work.”

“I had never done solo stuff before,” said Adrienne, “and had never had an interest in it. I found it really challenging and thrilling – doing solo work as well as stand-up. Both were new to me.”

“It was a big leap,” I said. “First solo show. Small room. Nudity.”

“Yeah,” said Adrienne. “And make it about rape. What could go wrong? I knew I’d made a show that basically had a shape and an arc and was basically what I wanted to say. But I had only done that exact version of the show in front of an audience once – about four days before I left for Edinburgh.

“I was hoping to make a little bit of a splash with Hey, maybe you can talk about rape this way, I also just wanted to perform 30 nights in a row because I knew, by the end of it, I would have something better than what I arrived with. I would get all that feedback from an audience and sort it out.”

Adrienne, winner of Malcolm Hardee Comedy Award 2013 (Photograph by Keir O’Donnell)

As it turned out, Adrienne won the increasingly prestigious Malcolm Hardee Award for Comic Originality and the Panel Prize for whatever the Perrier Awards were called last year.

“I have,” Adrienne told me, “never yet got a review saying: This is an outrage! Why did she do it?”

“Would you say you were a feminist?”

“I’m absolutely feminist. But I want this show to be understood as a comedy show. It’s really fun for me to watch the audiences’ eyes when I do my show. “

“So, are you going to do a Rape 2 show next year?”

“No. But I was talking to (promoter) Bob Slayer over one too many bourbons last night about doing maybe a one-off in Edinburgh this year about some material that’s come up from doing the show.”

“A show about the show?”

“A night about the show.”

“I’ll be there,” I said.

Today’s headline in the Daily Mirror

Yesterday, children’s entertainer Rolf Harris was found guilty of twelve sexual assault charges dating back to the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, including an attack on a child of seven.

“He always had the reputation,” I said to a chum this morning, “of being a groper. And, I mean, feeling the breasts of 22 year-old secretaries is obviously bad, but this is a different level. Now, I suppose, we won’t see him in clips of any old programmes, just like the BBC now removes Jimmy Savile from any old Top of the Pops re-screenings.”

“It’s as if all my childhood memories are being trashed,” my chum said. “First of all it was Gary Glitter and Do You Wanna Be in My Gang? and I Love You Love and now it’s Rolf and Two Little Boys and Jake The Peg mit his extra leg.”

They didn’t want Gary Glitter in the gang

“Well,” I said, “I loved the Spice Girls movie Spice World and that had a big sequence in it with Gary Glitter in Do You Wanna Be in My Gang? and they had to cut it out at the last moment before release because he got arrested and most of the Spice Girls’ fan base were pre-pubescent and only-just pubescent girls.”

“My friends in Germany used to come over every year to see Garry Glitter perform,” said my chum. “It was their big annual thing, like going to the Glastonbury Festival.”

“How old were they?” I asked.

“In their twenties, I guess. And there was a poster about reduced railway tickets for students. I asked at the railway station, got two of those and sent one to Germany. Obviously, I don’t have it up on the wall now and I haven’t played my Gary Glitter records since: I’ve got one of his LPs.”

A British Rail poster featuring Gary Glitter

“Why don’t you play the record?” I asked.

“Because all you’re aware of is that this person singing is this very unpleasant person who wants to use and abuse people, that sex is so trashed, debased turned into a nasty abusive thing.”

“But,” I said, “the music is still the same. If it was good before, it’s still good now, even if you know the guy was a nasty sexual predator. Just because you’re a mass murderer doesn’t mean you can’t produce a good piece of music or a great novel or a movie.”

“You’ve said that about Roman Polanski before,” my chum told me.

“Yes,” I said. “I think he should have his bollocks cut off and be thrown in a pit of vipers for the rest of his life. But it doesn’t change the fact Macbeth and Dance of The Vampires are great films and they should not suddenly be un-screened.”

Unlucky British Rail also used Jimmy Savile (centre back) in their ads

“It’s irrelevant whether it’s good or not,” said my chum. “It’s a reminder of something nasty that has ruined that work of art. With Roman Polanski, he (normally) is not actually starring in the films and most people aren’t aware who directed a film. It’s not like Gary Glitter or Rolf Harris or Jimmy Savile who are up there performing in front of you as themselves. Once you know something about someone, it changes your perception and you can’t un-know it.

“The thing is my experience of… It’s not a heavy one like other people you know… But, on the beach when I was nine or ten, we were all by the chewing gum machines and it was dark and late and the parents were off in the house chatting. And there was this man – he might have been only a teenager himself, but he seemed a grown man to me – he was putting change in the chewing gum machine.

“I was walking on the beach about twenty yards away from the other kids, somehow. And he said Hold my finger and I realised it wasn’t his finger, cos it was without a bone in it. It was squidgy.

“I was only a kid and all I knew was there was something alarming about it. Something unpleasant and you realised Oh! a bit like the ice cracking underneath you if you were on ice. Or Oh shit! The road’s falling away. Oh dear! Trouble! Nasty! It’s like you’re treading on ordinary ground and then Oh, no! This is wrong! This isn’t right! How do I save myself from this?

“It was nothing that I even understood. You don’t really understand anything at nine or ten. This adult is intending to do something. You hadn’t wanted to hold someone’s finger. They’ve even lied to you to get you to do something. Your mind is with all the other kids like Let’s run round in circles and then run round in the other direction! You’re on that level and suddenly… It is a nasty thing and in one’s consciousness your brain is suddenly aware of Alarm! Danger! – What’s this?”

“And,” I suggested, “you don’t quite know what the danger is?”

“Yes. You’re completely in your own little world as a kid. You just know something is not good. Nothing hurt. He wasn’t nasty to me. He didn’t say nasty things… You never forget it happened. If something worse had happened, it must be like…”

She paused.

“Did you tell your parents?” I asked.

“No. Why didn’t I tell them? There’s a feeling that someone’s done something wrong. Something’s gone wrong. If a dog had come and bit me or even just frightened me, I’d have told them Oh! That dog’s frightening me! but, for some reason… It’s as if you don’t know if maybe you have done something wrong yourself. I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong. But it was like you are in a complete sleep and you suddenly wake up and find yourself in a slight nightmare of Oh! What’s this? Oh no! This isn’t right! I just turned round and walked away. I realised it wasn’t his finger. I think that’s what woke me up to the danger.”

The deleted Spice World sequence featuring Gary Glitter is on YouTube.

A British Rail poster from the past, with paedophile pop star Gary Glitter

The last words of my blog yesterday were:

“The past does not exist, even though everything is interconnected by happenstance.”

Someone took exception when they read this yesterday and told me:

“You’re an idiot. Of course the past exists.”

Well, it doesn’t and it does…

Two days ago, I posted a blog headlined Rolf Harris, Jimmy Savile, Gary Glitter, Roman Polanski – and what it is like to be sexually assaulted as a child.

Yesterday, I got a response from ‘Sandy Mac’. This turned out to be someone I met at the Edinburgh Fringe last year. This is what she wrote yesterday:

I was born in 1946.

I was about seven years old or a bit younger and sometimes looked after by a neighbour with a small daughter. I rarely saw her husband but, on this occasion, he was at home.

He and I were in the front room sitting in front of the fire. Amidst the chat, I looked up to see this ‘thing’ in his hand which he urged me to touch.

I remember feeling uncertain, confused if not a bit frightened at what he was asking, although I didn’t know why.

I remember him saying: “Go on. It won’t bite.”

Then his wife called us to the kitchen to eat. I can’t remember how I felt after that as we all sat around the table.

I do know that I didn’t tell my mother, but I didn’t go to that house again.

A happy coincidence maybe, but no explanation was given.

In my early twenties, I remember working for one particular employer who was an absolute menace around women. He also wielded quite a lot of power. Not a happy combination. As well as witnessing my employer’s behaviour towards women at first hand, I heard accounts from other people too. This would have been in the mid-1960s.

That sadly was the climate of the times.

Police at that time, I remember, were loathe to intervene in cases of domestic violence. Oh how I applauded Erin Pizzey when she opened her first refuge in Chiswick in the early 1970s.

I was an ‘unmarried mother’ at sixteen and was sent to a mother and baby home, run by nuns in Stamford Hill.

The stigma was huge in 1962, only matched by my mother’s disappointment in me.

My daughter will be 52 this year with three boys of her own. She was reunited in Canada with her father and his lovely wife. She and her dad had about ten years to get to know one another. She was with him when he died a few years ago now.

Shelley talked to me at the Soho Theatre in London yesterday

Shelley Bridgman has been married for 40 years, has two grown up daughters and a grandchild.

Remember that.

In February 2011, I wrote a blog which started:

“I was in the Apple Store in Regent Street last week and bumped into the multi-talented comic Shelley Cooper, who has almost finished writing her autobiography – now THAT should be a cracking read.”

Well, now she is Shelley Bridgman and she has published the book. It is called Stand-Up For Yourself with the subtitle… and become the hero or shero you were born to be.

“People tell me it’s an inspiring story,” Shelley told me yesterday at the Soho Theatre. “It’s about overcoming crap and then sorting your life out.”

“And it is crying out to be a movie,” I said.

“Of course,” laughed Shelley.

“Who would play you?” I asked.

“Vanessa Redgrave.”

“You and I talked about you writing your autobiography years ago,” I said.

“Well,” said Shelley, “I wanted to write it, but I didn’t quite know how to do it. I had this voice ringing in my ears saying: Who are you to write an autobiography?”

“So why write it?”

“I think it was having so much rubbish written about me. I got fed up with it. In the end, for the book, I broke my life down into eight sections and, at the end of each one, I have an imaginary conversation with a different hero. People like Groucho Marx, Spike Milligan, Joan Rivers, Oscar Wilde, even Oprah Winfrey because she does an amazing chat show. And my grandmother pops up as a hero.”

Shelley is now in the final year of a doctorate in psychotherapy.

Shelley became the shero of her own life

“When I got my masters degree in psychotherapy,” Shelley told me, “I was talking to this professor and he said Why don’t you do a doctorate? and my response was: Because I’m not academic…

“I mean, I left school at 15 without a single O level. I was born in a prefab. I had humble beginnings and then went downhill.

“This professor looked me in the eye and said: Fucking get over it. You just got a masters degree. Do a doctorate. That inspired me.”

Shelley became a stand-up comic around the turn of the century.

“That,” she says, “was as a result of winning a speech competition and the judge saying: That was funny. You should do stand-up.”

“So how,” I asked, “did you get from being a stand-up comic to being a psychotherapist?”

“I was doing that before. I ran a travel business, then I became a counsellor to make sense of my own madness, really, and got more serious about it.”

“Are you using the name Shelley Bridgman for everything now?” I asked. “No longer Shelley Cooper for comedy?”

“As you know,” Shelley said, “my real name is Bridgman, but I was angry with my dad for a long time, so I rejected the family name. About three years ago, I wasn’t doing very much stand-up as Shelley Cooper, so I thought This is a good time to change it. Cooper was my mum’s maiden name. In fact, it was Fenimore Cooper but they dropped the Fenimore because they thought it was a bit pretentious.”

“You are related,” I said, “to the bloke who wrote The Last of The Mohicans.”

“Yes,” said Shelley, “But I think it’s a bit distant.”

“And you’ve done at least one autobiographical comedy show.”

Shelley Cooper had Fringe Growing Pains

“The first one I ever did was called Growing Pains. You made an interesting comment when I did my second show Shelley Cooper Rewrites History. I always remember because it resonated a lot with me. You wrote: Shelley has still to find her own post-transsexual voice.”

“Oh God, did I?” I said.

“I thought it was valid,” said Shelley. “What happened was I had allowed people to tell me what I should be talking about on stage and it wasn’t really my voice. Everyone else thought it was interesting, but I was bored to hell with it.”

“And you were talking about…?”

“The fact I’m a trans-gender woman. And I didn’t really want to talk about that. I do accept that – especially when I do 20-minute comedy sets in a rough club – I have to nail it and move on… so I still deal with it… but I don’t talk about it any more because I’m not interested.”

I prefer to think of Shelley not as trans-gender person but as trans-genre person. The blurb on her book cover reads:

Shelley Bridgman is an award-winning stand-up comic, actor, scriptwriter, professional speaker and a leading psychotherapist – but it wasn’t always this way. 

First she survived the hedonistic sixties with the inevitable round of clubbing, fashion and drugs; then she made the most of the seventies, travelling to over sixty countries whilst running a travel business – but it was the eighties that tested her to her limits. Battling depression, bankruptcy, addiction and suicide attempts, Shelley found the strength to confront her need to change gender and achieve harmony with herself. 

A unique story told with delightfully dry humour about identity, self-discovery, acceptance and courage. It is also testament to a profoundly touching love story that has lasted over forty years.

“I spent a year writing the book,” Shelley told me yesterday, “and 18 months letting go of it. It was being edited but there comes a point where you have to say: Enough! Get it proof-read and get the damn thing out!

“A lot of the painful stuff I talk about, I’ve already dealt with. One of the challenges with writing my story is the first half is pretty miserable and the second half is very positive and, if it’s too linear, the reader is gonna think: When are we going to get to something a bit uplifting?”

“You’re still doing stand-up comedy,” I said.

“I won that Silver Stand-Up award at the Leicester Comedy Festival in 2012,” said Shelley. “It was for old fogeys.”

The award was for best stand-up comedian over the age of 55.

Shelley Cooper/Shelley Bridgman – trans genre success story

“What I’ve done in the last two years,” she told me, “is to take a step back. I was enjoying doing proper comedy clubs like The King’s Head, but getting sick to death of doing rooms above a pub with a load of drunks on a Friday night. So I decided I wanted to do more political humour, which is what I’m doing now. I’m writing a show at the moment and I’m compering a show out in Bucks, because it gives me the chance to say what I want on stage.

“I watch one or two people who talk about being political comics but there’s no such thing anymore because people, by and large, don’t want to hear it. I thought: Make a statement. Say what you really think – without being a left wing ranter because that’s just easy. Calling George Osborne a C U Next Tuesday might be true, but it’s hardly cutting-edge rapier wit. I thought: For God’s sake do what YOU want to do now and start to enjoy it again.

“The show I enjoyed performing most was Britishness in 2007/2008. I filled up the room every night at the Edinburgh Fringe and went to New York and Rome with it. That was really fun and that was the thing which sparked me into thinking: Oh screw it! Just do what you want to do.”

“Which now is?” I asked.

“I’ve just started doing a podcast interviewing comics – The Comedy Studio. It’s part of my dastardly plan to show people I’m capable of interviewing. I’d like to do a chat show on the radio, but it’s got to have an angle. I think the art of interviewing has died, because most – though not all – chat shows now are about the hosts. The reason Michael Parkinson was good in his early days was because he knew when to shut up – having asked a question that made the guest really think – rather than ask: Do you like coffee of tea?”

“Well,” I said, “Parkinson was an experienced journalist, whereas almost all the chat show people now are stars who have been given a chat show because they are popular.”

“I’m not a journalist,” said Shelley, “but I’m a psychotherapist, so I’m used to teasing out things from people with questions. I wanna be given a chance because I think I can do it and that’s really what I’m aiming at. I’m still enjoying stand-up comedy, but not seven nights a week.”

Copstick and Simon after yesterday’s Grouchy Club, her broken arm recovering in a sling

The Grouchy Club has been running at the Edinburgh Fringe for sixteen days now and we are getting regular members of the audience – both comedians and ordinary members of the public – coming back day after day. Yesterday, notable newcomers included a CNN reporter and a large man in a leather jacket.

“The gent in the back row looks vaguely ‘industry’ to me,” I said. “An ageing roadie, perhaps.”

“Well,” said my co-host, Kate Copstick, her arm in a sling after a fall the previous day. “I first worked with Simon in…”

“What does Simon do?” I asked.

“Well,” Simon said, “I used to be a TV producer and then went on to other things…”

“We did programmes on motor bikes,” said Copstick, “and then we did sex. We did porn.”

“Do we talk about this?” I asked.

“Well,” said Copstick, “he’s a happily-married man with two children; I don’t see why not.”

We were also graced with the presence of Miss Behave, co-presenter with comedian Janey Godley of next Friday’s increasingly prestigious Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards Show. Copstick is presenting the actual Awards at the show.

“You know,” I said to Miss Behave, “that Copstick has smashed her elbow in now?”

“I know,” said Miss Behave. “I think there should be a slave for Copstick on the show. I don’t care which forums we scout. It could be Fringe forums; it could be other forums. You just need someone whose idea of heaven would be to jump when Copstick blinks – goes and makes her coffee or helps her to the toilet.”

Kate Copstick used to go clubbing (not baby seals)

“I think those people might be few and far between,” said Copstick. “Though, when I used to go clubbing – to SM clubs – I went as a sub but, because of the way I dressed, everyone thought I was not. So I was constantly getting sad little men coming up wanting to be my slave and the one time I said Yes, it was just embarrassing.

“I only went there so someone would rip three kinds of shit out of me with a whip and then I had this strange little man following me around and I had to spend hours every day working out things for him to do… I’ll do that… No, let me do it!”

“This year,” I said, “the increasingly prestigious Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards Show is lacking in nudity because we don’t have the Greatest Show On Legs.”

“We could,” suggested Miss Behave, “just cough and Bob Slayer would pop up.”

“We could run an advert,” suggested Copstick: “Someone needed to get their cock out on the increasingly prestigious Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards Show.”

“And who better than you?” I suggested. “But the CNN lady looked particularly interested when S&M clubs were mentioned.”

“I have a friend who has a slave,” said Miss Behave, “and, in return for her walking on him with heels or whatever, he cleans her house, he cleans her shoes…”

“There’s a lot of ‘sissy mates’,” said Copstick.

“I personally would not be able to handle it,” said Miss Behave.

“I,” said Copstick, “have a friend who married her slave and he was something like a really high-up merchant banker or investment banker who comes home to run around in an apron and heels.”

“As far as I can gather,” I said, “the men who want to be submissive tend to be in positions of power at work whereas I, being only increasingly prestigious, don’t need it.”

“But,” said Copstick, “once you become truly prestigious…”

“Ah, then,” I said, “I guess I will suddenly have an urge to head for the apron, will I?”

“Have we,” asked Miss Behave, “got Russian Egg Roulette at the increasingly prestigious Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards Show?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Have we got ponchos?” asked Miss Behave.

“If anyone wants one,” I said.

This year, Miss Behave has gone all glittery golden

“Can I play again?” asked Miss Behave.

“Of course,” I said.

“I won’t be in rubber this year,” said Miss Behave, “I will be wearing gold and I don’t want to get eggs all over it.”

This will be worth seeing.

On Friday. Be there.

Things you can buy for £1 in Poundland – two cartons of milk. (This honestly becomes much more relevant later in this blog)

This is the final day of the Edinburgh Fringe and, as is traditional, it is a Bank Holiday in England, but not in Scotland. This means that, in Scotland, all the shops are open and it is a normal working day… except that the banks are closed.

You may want to read that paragraph again.

You did not mis-read it.

Yes. It is not a Bank Holiday and everywhere is open except the banks.

This does not seem odd in Edinburgh in August.

I saw a man dressed as a showgirl talking to a medieval monk outside a church last week.

Claire Smith on her iPhone and Matt Price thinks of sausages

And I am posting this after having had breakfast with comedian Matt Price and Scotsman journalist Claire Smith.

To brighten up their mornings, they have been asking people round to share sausages with them.

“I went through a phase,” Matt told me, “of taking a toy fish out onto the stage with me. When you start out as a comic, you assume anyone who contributes – like a heckler – is a threat. But they’re not. Sometimes they might be just thinking out loud. Sometimes they may be just eccentric.

“The fish became a good device for dealing with hecklers. If someone heckled me, I would say: Look, what you said wasn’t bad. But would you like to do it a second time and this time you have to do it holding a fish? It created a certain dynamic in the room and I’ve seen grown men start quivering. It was great fun: just playing around with the audience. You learn how to embrace hecklers rather than be frightened of them.

“I used to be scared of the audience. I was always very self-conscious until one day Martha (Matt’s partner) said to me: Why don’t you learn to love the audience? Why don’t you learn to accept that they maybe don’t hate you: maybe they’re there to have a good time. 

“And it was like flipping a switch. It changed almost immediately.”

I am an innocent at large in Grouchy Club with Kate Copstick

Matt and Claire were at yesterday’s final Grouchy Club show at the Edinburgh Fringe, in which critic Kate Copstick and I basically gossiped with comedians.

Yesterday, four genuine members of the ‘real’ public had inexplicably wandered in thinking they were seeing a totally different show. Also in the audience were sundry comedians, the head of the Stage newspaper’s Fringe review team, someone possibly pretending not to be from The British Comedy Guide and a Greek physicist; I have no explanation.

Kate Copstick examined Matt Price’s left-over comedy props

Matt’s first words yesterday, as he delved into a bag containing giant pink edible chocolate penises, were: “I’m not being crude, but…”

He explained: “My show is about self-assertion and I went into Ann Summers to buy some props for the show and the woman persuaded me to buy fifty giant pink edible chocolate penises. So I have loads of cocks. You’re very welcome. They’re really good quality. I’m sick of edible cocks. You’re welcome. Just, please… I’ve had enough. I’ve genuinely had enough. There’s 900 calories in each one of these,” said Matt.

“But,” said mind-reader Doug Segal, “if you’re practical, you can work off some of those calories.”

Kate Copstick sampling chocolate yesterday

Copstick sampled the product, saying: “It’s nicer than it looks,” but then started to choke and cough.

“They’re £9,” said Matt.

“Why on earth do you have so many left?” asked Doug.

“I over-anticipated,” said Matt.

Copstick had another attempt at sampling the product.

“It looks like Christmas morning,” said comic Matt Roper  (not to be confused with Matt Price) without explanation.

Copstick started coughing again. When she recovered, she said:

Poundland: a rival to Ann Summers’ sex shops in Edinburgh?

“Oddly enough, I’ve just been across to Poundland (a chain of shops where everything is priced at £1) and the thing with it is you have to keep going because you never know what is going to be there. It’s like a charity shop: you never know when something wonderful is going to come in.

“Today in Poundland,” she continued, rummaging in a bag, “I got vibrators and vibrating cock rings.”

She produced one of each.

There was controlled uproar and some disbelief in the room.

Kate Copstick’s discoveries from Poundland

“One pound each!” said Copstick.

“With batteries?” asked the Greek physicist.

“No, not with the batteries,” replied Copstick. “But I work a lot with commercial sex workers in Kenya and any time I can give the girls who want to stay as commercial sex workers any toys that they can use on the guys for bargaining… You can’t force a man to use a condom, but you can persuade him to wear one. If they try to force him to use one, the guy will just rape them and run away…

“Yesterday (at the Grouchy Club), I was talking about how I taught them about peppermint blow jobs and poor man’s champagne blow jobs.”

“What is a peppermint blow job?” asked Matt Roper.

“You get your girlfriend,” explained Copstick, “to either spread a little peppermint toothpaste over the inside of her mouth – or a mouthwash – and then, when she gives the blow job, it’s all tingly.”

“In Poundland,” I said, “you can get toothpaste for £1. It really is the poor man’s Ann Summers.”

“For the poor man’s champagne blow job,” said Copstick, “you just use beer instead of champagne and the bubbles kind of tickle.”

“It’s a great way to get a yeast infection,” said an anonymous voice from the audience.

The chat show with comedians that provides oh so much more

That was just the start of The Grouchy Club’s final free Edinburgh show. Later we got on to the contest to find Edinburgh’s best Lewis Schaffer impersonator.

Claire Smith won.

Her prize was a Poundland vibrator.

“What have you done with it?” I asked her this morning. “Have you mounted it on the mantelpiece?”

“I think I might get some batteries,” she replied.

“And what’s next for you?” I asked Matt.

“No fish and no confectionary-based humour,” he told me. “It’s too stressful. I need to move on.”

“There is talk of a monthly London Grouchy Club – a venue has been suggested – and we have been approached by a pay venue to do the daily show again at next year’s Edinburgh Fringe – though I am not sure how a pay-to-enter show would work.

Perhaps we could get sponsored by Ann Summers or Poundland.

Copstick publicity shot for The Grouchy Club

In yesterday’s blog, comedy critic Kate Copstick explained why she gave up her planned career as a lawyer because she lost faith in the legal system.

“So,” I asked, “then what did you decide you wanted to do?”

“I had always wanted to be an actress,” she told me at The Grouchy Club in Edinburgh. “So, when I got asked to do a play for no money, I said Yes. It was a piece by Pedro Calderón de la Barca with the snazzy title The House With Two Doors Is Hard To Guard. I played the comedy maid, which was when I discovered the joy of corsets.”

“Did you,” I asked, “want to be a comedy performer or an actress?”

“Oh, I wanted to be an actress,” she said. “I wanted to be Joan Crawford. I had posters on my wall of Debbie Harry, Joan Crawford and Bryan Ferry.

“But people preferred me trying to be funny. Then they kept asking me to write.”

“Why,” I asked, “would they ask you to write if you were an actress?”

“Because nobody believed I was really an actress. Also, I was so bossy that I tended to write and direct. It started off with me saying: Wouldn’t it be better if I said this…

Copstick, children’s favourite

“Then someone from Scottish Television saw me and I fronted a kids’ programme about the environment. Then I was asked down to London to present Play School for BBC TV.”

“Why?”

“They obviously just looked at me performing in my wig and my Ginger Rogers frock and thought: I would love to see this woman dressed as a penguin jumping up and down on children’s television.”

I told her: “I used to know someone who did Playbus. He went into porn.”

“Many of us did,” said Copstick.

“How long did you do Play School?” I asked.

The prim, proper and always professional Copstick

“About four years, then I did a load of other kids’ programmes – Up Our Street, No 73…”

“Did you do that rude Christmas tape for No 73?” I asked.

“Everything was rude when you got behind the scenes,” said Copstick. “The very first place I ever encountered cocaine was on Play School.

“Because it was only pre-school television with small budgets, they didn’t give you any time for re-takes. Once you started recording, you had time to do two episodes back-to-back. That was it. No mucking about. No re-takes. So we rehearsed endlessly. One time, we did all the rehearsing including the songs and it was all lovely, all great, all timed to perfection. But when we recorded it, the show was a whole minute short and nobody could understand why.

Copstick first encountered cocaine in children’s television…

“It turned out that, between the rehearsals and the recording, the boys in the band had been in the dressing room enjoying some of Bolivia’s finest (cocaine) and all the songs had gone at almost twice the speed they had in the rehearsals.

“So the programmes were not just educational for the children, they were educational for me personally.

“I did this show called Whizz and got on Top of the Pops. We recorded the theme tune, released it as a single and, for some reason, it did really well in the charts. No-one could understand why until I went on Top of the Pops and somebody told me it had a massive student following because the hook line was Do the Biz, Do the Biz, With Whizz. None of the nice middle class ladies at the BBC realised Whizz/Wiz had any kind of double meaning whatsoever, but students thought it was fantastic.”

There is, sadly, no copy of this song on YouTube, but there is a video of Pulp singing Sorted For E’s and Wizz at Glastonbury.

“Was Jimmy Savile presenting Top of the Pops when you were on it?” I asked Copstick.

“No. It was Mike Read and Gary Davis. When I got to come down the chute onto the stage, there were all these girls. There were self-evidently 16-year-old girls who just went there in the hope that somebody famous would fondle their boobs.”

“You met Savile somewhere else?” I asked.

“I was doing a show called On The Waterfront up in Liverpool with Bernie Nolan (of The Nolan Sisters). She could drink more vodka on a night than anyone and get up at 7 o’clock the next morning looking like she was straight out of convent school. That girl had hollow legs. I’ve never met anyone who could drink like her.”

“You are too modest,” I said.

“She taught me everything I know!” said Copstick.

“And Savile?” I asked.

“On the show, I did a thing like Through The Keyhole, but it was called Through The Sunroof – I went into people’s cars. So I did Through The Sunroof with Jimmy Savile’s car and we had to go up to his house in Leeds and when I met him, instead of shaking my hand, he turned it over and licked the palm. Eurghh! Just loathsome. Some people you meet and you just know… And there was Rolf Harris, as well.”

Rolf Harris, former children’s entertainer

“You met Rolf?” I asked. “You must have been groped by Rolf. Everyone was groped by Rolf.”

“When he came on the show as a guest,” said Copstick, “we had a lovely young female director who used to wear trousers that had a rose trellis pattern. When Rolf came in, she was bending over to pick something up and he said: That’s a furrow I’d like to plough! He self-evidently was just a bit of a dirty old man which is not great, but I think there’s a difference between being a dirty old man and a paedophile.”

“He had a reputation for groping,” I said, “but I was surprised by the children.”

“I’ve kind of always thought,” said Copstick, “if you like grown-ups, you like grown ups; if you like kids, you like kids. It’s not really the same people. So, as an ex-lawyer, I was very surprised by the Rolf Harris verdict.

“I think, yet again, it’s the Establishment being so horrified and embarrassed that nobody did anything about Jimmy Savile or Cyril Smith or any of the other people they knew about but protected… that anybody they can now grab onto is going down because somebody has to and they can’t do anything about Savile because he’s dead.

Copstick at last month’s Edinburgh Fringe

“I’m sure all of us who are grown-up and female have had some hideous, ghastly, creepy uncle type stick his tongue in your ear before he should and you just go Ughh! but there’s a long, long way between that and being attacked. I think all the women who are lining up claiming Dave Lee Travis held their boobs are doing a terrible amount of damage to the people who really did suffer.

“It must be horrendous. I can’t imagine what it must have been like being one of these boys in the home that Cyril Smith went to. Or being in Stoke Mandeville Hospital and seeing Jimmy Savile wander across the ward towards you with his cock in his hand. Horrendous. Horrendous! But it’s not the same thing at all as a bit of a misjudgment.”

… CONTINUED HERE …

Mama Biashara’s Kate Copstick

In the last two blogs, comedy critic Kate Copstick told me how she became disillusioned as a lawyer, discovered cocaine in children’s TV and met Jimmy Savile. Today’s blog, from a chat at The Grouchy Club, brings her story up to date.

“So you were a children’s TV presenter in London,” I said. “How did you end up writing for The Scotsman newspaper in Edinburgh?”

“I was rent-a-gob female for ages on TV,” she said.

“Rent-a-feminist?” I asked.

“Oh, you’re joking!” Copstick replied. “Good God no! Do I look that humorless? I’m not anti-feminist. I just find it very irritating… Not everything is the fault of men. There were women who used to have to fight for stuff in Britain but I work most of the time in Kenya now. Women there really, really have to fight and terrible things happen to them. Appalling things. I see the real fight women have to fight in Africa: the terrible way they are treated. Then I come back to Britain and find some twat of an actress has gone on Facebook saying Aw, we were hosting a serious play and someone said Nice tits! and I would really have thought blah blah blah blah… Hashtag EverydayMisogyny.

“If you really, really care about women and women’s rights, then in Britain we’re doing kind of relatively OK. Why not come with me to countries where women are really doing very badly? If you care so bloody much, come with me and help them. Don’t sit here and get outraged because in Britain some woman has five children, is adopting a third, can only work every third Monday and then only until 5 o’clock in the afternoon and is complaining because she’s not chairman of the bloody company board.”

“So,” I said, “you were a rent-a-gob female but not a feminist…”

“Yes. And I did loads of TV gameshows. I hosted a couple for the BBC. But, at the same time, I was doing lots of writing.”

“About what?” I asked.

“Sex,” said Copstick. “Mainly sex. Stick to what you know. They say that in comedy. In writing too. I could have written about Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law, but it just never had the sales potential that sex and alcohol did. I wrote for FHM magazine. I did a column called Stuff Your Face With Copstick. I used to take famous men out for lunch and we’d get reasonably drunk and then I’d write about what I remembered of it and it seemed to go down well.”

“I’m sure you did,” I said.

The Erotic Review led to comedy reviews

“Then,” said Copstick, “I interviewed Rowan Pelling, who was working for the Erotic Review. She was posh totty. The Arts Editor of The Scotsman – Robert Dawson Scott – sent me down to interview her. He liked what I wrote and (in 1999) he said What about coming and devastating young people’s dreams in August for a month (reviewing comedy at the Edinburgh Fringe) and I thought Weyhey! That sounds like fun! The Darth Vader effect seemed to suit me and I did more and more writing.”

Copstick now owns The Erotic Review and is the doyernne of comedy reviewers at the Edinburgh Fringe but, for around six months of each year, she works in Kenya.

“You have a charity in Kenya,” I said to her.

“Yes. Mama Biashara, which is Swahili for Business Mother. I get people who are really up to their nipples in horror and – I’m not a particularly touchy-feely person – I don’t do all that I feel your pain. Let’s go and talk thing. You can talk till the cows come home and it’s not going to do any good.

“No! You don’t empower people by talking. You empower people by giving them money and a skill so then they can tell the bad guys to fuck off. That’s how you empower people. Not by sitting and giving them ideas that are never going to come true.”

Mama Biashara gives people who previously had no hope small amounts of money and practical help to start their own self-sustaining small businesses.

Copstick (in blue) at new Mama Biashara well

“For a lot of the commercial sex workers,” said Copstick, “we have a thing called Kucha Kool (kucha is the Swahili word for finger nail) where they become roving manicurists. You have to start a business that plays to your strengths and the girls who come off the street we try to set up in hairdresser businesses or sewing or as manicurists.

“With the Kucha Kool girls, I give them a dozen assorted nail varnishes, emery boards and buffers and whatever else in a nice case and then they hit the ground running, because they can make 1,500 bob a day (a ‘bob’ is a Kenyan Shilling) and when you consider they got 40 bob for a shag, then 1,500 bob a day is pretty good.

“I buy all that in bulk here in Britain, where it’s cheaper, and then we can hand somebody a business start-up in Kenya.”

“You used to live in the Nairobi slums in a storage container,” I said.

“I have to live in the slums, really,” said Copstick, “because I can’t afford anything else and because I’m kind of obsessive about the money from Mama Biashara going to the women – the people – who need it. I pay all my own expenses. And it’s fine. Who needs to have an inside toilet? My gran lived perfectly well without one.”

“And where do you live in Nairobi now?” I asked.

“Well, thereby hangs a tale,” said Copstick. “Just before I went into my first show at the Fringe (at the beginning of August), I got a text from Kenya saying: Call us! Call us! It is a disaster! 

“In the slums, we had set up a little house. The front of it was mbati (corrugated metal). The sides were stone. The back was bits of wood. And the roof was a patchwork of everything. I was describing it to a friend in Kenya and he said: Oh, that is a very random house. So we called it The Random House. It was the headquarters for Mama Biashara, with loads of stuff there, blankets, lots of hair dryers to start hairdressing businesses, three sewing machines which I had just bought, loads of medication and just everything to help people start up a business.

“You can hire men from the City Council. You pay them 200 bob and they will do any type of thuggery you want. Apparently at 4.00am on a Tuesday morning, about a dozen men from the City Council came to the compound where The Random House is, broke in, carted out on City Council handcarts everything that was inside and then brought a bulldozer and flattened it.”

Copstick returns to Nairobi on Sunday.

When I asked her last week where she was going to live, she told me: “The house has been knocked down, so I have absolutely no idea. I will just have to see when I get there.”

This has been a funny and complicated old week so, instead of what I did yesterday, here are three extracts from my e-diary 15 years ago – on 8th October 1999.

1.

This can give even a seasoned performer  heart palpitations

I phoned up a comedian. He was worried.

He had had more heart palpitations – for about 90 minutes.

This morning he had gone to his local hospital for tests.

He told me he would get the results within ten days.

He thought maybe the problems were caused by the stress of giving performances and moving house.

He talked of maybe giving up performing: “It makes you think,” he told me.

2.

Not recommended by me (Photo is free from Wikipedia)

I had a meal with a TV colleague. He told me it was only taking cocaine that had got him off his anti-depressants (members of the Prozac family of drugs).

Before that, trying to get off the anti-depressants, he was getting bright silver flashes in his brain.

I think he should have stuck with the silver flashes, given the way coke has now screwed-up his brain and his personality.

3.

A Mars Bar divided in half as it should be, not in a messy way.

I mentioned to the same television colleague the famous (possibly mythical) Mars Bar story involving Marianne Faithfull and the Rolling Stones. He told me it had inspired him to do the same thing.

But, with the Mars Bar embedded in the girl’s vagina, there is a point beyond which you cannot eat and, by that point, it has become impossible to extricate the stump of the confectionery bar from within the girl. It is further complicated by the fact that the periphery of the Mars Bar has melted and is, in effect, glued to the insides of her vagina.

He was reduced to exhorting her to push and push as if it was childbirth to try and expel the chocolate bar. Eventually, they succeeded.

“It was,” he told me, “un-erotic and, for quite a while, a bit of a sticky situation.”

Regular readers will know of Anna Smith, this blog’s occasional Canadian correspondent. She tells me about quirky happenings over there, mostly in Vancouver, which seems to be a hotbed of the bizarre.

A couple of days ago, Anna sent me a link to a YouTube video – someone called Carole Pope singing – after a fashion – Lesbians in The Forest.

I have led a sheltered life and had never heard of Carole Pope.

“The mighty Pope?” reacted Anna, aghast. “Do you not know of her work?”

“Nope,” I told her. Never heard of her or seen her. I think maybe you had to be there.”

Anna replied: “You had to be at The Colonial Tavern, 201 Yonge Street, in 1977.”

No, I had no idea either.

I usually describe Anna as working in a bookshop in Vancouver, which she does. But she has a back-story.

This is a tiny part of it, in Anna’s own words:

In the dressing room at Le Strip, whenever we heard Carole Pope being interviewed on the CBC, the strippers would shout:

“SHUT UP, SHUT UP! It’s The POPE! The POPE! THE MIGHTY POPE!”.

We all knew her from The Colonial Tavern in Toronto. It was the first bar to open in the city after World War II. It broke the ‘colour bar’ and became a famous jazz dance venue.

By 1977, the jazz had evaporated. Newspaper ads promised: ROCK BANDS AND EXOTIC BLACK BOTTOM SERVING MAIDENS. I was one of the serving maidens, dressed in lingerie and heels, but my bottom was not black. The serving maidens also danced on stage.

The  ‘house dancer’ was Hot Tamale, a robust and temperamental older Jamaican woman, who did a fire act called HOT TAMALE AND HER FLAMING BATONS .

We tried to stay out of her path because she was often in a foul mood running off the stage, sickened by the kerosene.

A shockingly sexy slender young woman with short black hair

One quiet afternoon, I was serving beer. I could not fail to notice the band Rough Trade. It consisted of a male bass player and a shockingly sexy slender young woman with short black hair. Carole Pope. She was the first female punk singer I had ever seen, and she was a hell of a lot sexier than any of the serving maidens – whatever colour their bottoms were.

Thick with youthful ignorance, I wondered: Wait a minute – What is going on here? I am supposed to be the sexy one, She’s only a musician.

When I tell someone that I was a striptease dancer they often ask: “So, you did that thing with the pole?” And they wave their arms a bit. It is like telling people you live on a boat. They always ask: “Doesn’t the…(and then they make a rocking movement with their hands)… bother you?”

When they ask about the pole, I have to explain: “I am from before the pole. (It sounds like Beyond the Pale.) I am from before the cassette tape was invented. We had to dance to real live musicians, except in some places where we had to dance to juke boxes, which was a whole other nightmare.

The ever interesting Anna Smith

One of the worst places I ever danced was a country music bar in Toronto. It was not on street level – You had to go up a flight of stairs. Everyone there looked like they had been drunk for weeks, so it was not really dangerous because they could barely stand up. They were all old people, dressed like country music fans, and – of course – smoking

I panicked a bit, trying to pick up the songs, which I didn’t know. People were lurching past me. The first song to play was Ghost Riders in the Sky, which was tolerable, I made an effort but, at some point, I ended up slowly, slowly, very slowly removing my red bra to It’s a Fine Time to Leave Me Lucille and the old people started singing to it.

It seemed like the song would never end. I felt like I wanted to die. There wasn’t even a stage in that place, I was dancing on a small parquet dance floor.

I never went back there.

But that’s why I’m fearless on stage now, having gone through that experience.

Now we jump to The Emerald Supper Club in Vancouver on 18th October 2014 – last Saturday.

Carole Pope – last Saturday. (Photograph by Anna Smith)

I was sitting in the front row making a fuss.

Carole Pope looked a bit shaken when I yelled out: ”All the strippers in Toronto call you The Mighty Pope!!!”

I settled down eventually, after Carole started to look slightly alarmed. She has enough crazed stalker fans as it is.

So I did my best to sit quietly and leaned against the comfy shoulder of the agreeable slightly plump agoraphobic man sitting beside me whom I had never met before. His name was André.

André was eccentrically dressed, wearing a fedora, a nice navy blue woollen jacket,  a steel cell phone watch and, next to that, another slender gold-lamé watch decorated with diamonds. His other hand was bandaged with tape and he was carrying a very fancy knapsack.

He said that he had met Carole Pope before – they had a photographer friend in common. He was not sure that she would remember him. He knew all the words to all her songs and sang along.

I don’t know her work that well. I just did not want to miss her performance and it certainly was not a disappointment. I laughed all the way through her satiric song Lesbians in the Forest and, halfway through her set, I applauded too hard and burst a blood vessel on my left palm. On my walk home I encountered a happily drunk sixty year old native man who was out looking for his nephew.

“What are you doing down here?” he asked me.

“Do you know Carole Pope?” I asked him.

“Of course,” he answered. “High School Confidential. Everybody knows that.”

“I saw her tonight ” I said.

“You’re kidding!” he said. “Where?”

“She gave a concert in a little club,” I said. “I clapped so hard I busted a vein in my hand.”

High School Confidential was the first song about a lesbian crush to become a mainstream hit in Canada.

That was last Saturday.

A friend just messaged me that he saw her tour bus leaving town and had been worried that I might be on it.

There is a video of High School Confidential on YouTube.

Yesterday, I sent Anna an e-mail.

“Hold on!” I said. “You wrote: That’s why I’m fearless on stage now… NOW????”

I got a reply this morning:

August 3rd 2014: Anna waiting in the dressing room of The Flamingo Motor Inn, Vancouver.

Did I not mention that hearing The Outbursts’ song Dead To Me compelled me to perform a striptease this August at The Flamingo Motor Inn, a place that I normally would cross four lanes of highway to avoid? It was to raise money for the children of dancers orphaned by cancer. I worked my full shift at the bookstore, took the train to Surrey (in Greater Vancouver), and had one hour to prepare for my show. I told the compere, a lady named Charlie, that I felt a bit nervous and she said: “Oh, don’t worry, you’re not on for an hour.”

Yes, I thought, but I haven’t been ON for 25 years.

Oh – Carole Pope… She was born in Manchester, England. Dusty Springfield was her partner.

In 2000, Carole Pope’s autobiography Anti-Diva included the fact that, in the early 1980s, she had been in a relationship with British singer Dusty Springfield.

There is a clip on YouTube of Carole Pope introducing Dusty Springfield singing Pope’s Softcore.

Also on YouTube, there is a cracker of a video of Carole Pope singing Lou Reed’s I’m Waiting For The Man. Not relevant, but I like it.

Karl Schultz (left) and Joz Norris chatted over tea yesterday

So I said I would do a blog chat with comic Karl Schultz about a charity gig which he is organising in London on Monday. Karl brought along Joz Norris, who is co-organising the gig. Somewhere along the way, the conversation went off course.

“What’s the show?” I asked them yesterday.

“It’s Karl & Joz’s Over The Top Christmas Love-In at the Bloomsbury Theatre,” said Karl.

“For Karl’s charity,” added Joz.

“You have a charity?” I asked Karl.

“Oasis. It’s the one I run in Barking and Dagenham. It basically gives somewhere to go in the week to homeless people, unemployed people, people trying to come off drugs – recreational, free meals and stuff.”

On YouTube, Karl tells a story about his charity.

Monday’s charity show at the Bloomsbury Theatre includes comics Bridget Christie, John Kearns, Tim Key, Josie Long and Sara Pascoe.

“When did you start the charity?” I asked Karl.

“Last December. About 75% of the money from the gig is going to that charity, but I’m also going out to South Africa with my dad for a couple of weeks and we know some projects out there which could do with money.

“When I told someone I was going out to South Africa, someone said: Oh, you’re going on ‘holiday’ are you? ‘Holiday’. Apparently South Africa where people go with sex addictions. There’s a clinic or something. But I’m going out with my dad, who’s a Salvation Army major.”

Joz said: “I had some kids from a South African township stay with me in 2007. My mum did the African premiere of Karl Jenkins’ The Armed Man Mass for Peace. She had breakfast with Desmond Tutu twice and the choir came over here and stayed in my room and I had to stay in the shed all week. I taught them about iPods.”

“Did they have iPods?” I asked.

“No,” admitted Joz.

Karl Schultz: one of his more understated stage performances

“I,” said Karl, “was seeing a girl from Sierra Leone a couple of months ago, but she got sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Three women I’ve seen have got sectioned.”

“It doesn’t surprise me,” said Joz. “That’s your taste. I think you’re drawn to eccentrics.”

“I get approached by depressed women,” said Karl.

“I’m always attracted to mad women,” said Joz, “and they’re always either very short or very tall. But Karl hates short women. He says their bottoms are too close to the ground.”

“I do have a thing for tall women,” admitted Karl.

“Why?” I asked.

“My mum is 5’1”, so there’s no Oedipal thing. But I was brought up in Ghana from the age of 11-14 – the most formative time – and all the Ghanaians hit puberty before me. So, when I went back after the summer holidays, I had grown an inch but, in Ghana, they had grown six inches. So all the girls I was in love with in my class were all tall.

“Earlier this year, I was trying to be a better person and took a short woman on a date – I thought If I can survive it, I will be a better person for it – so we were walking on the South Bank in London drinking our chai lattes and she burnt her tongue on her chai latte and started hopping on the spot and I was looking at her thinking: Is this what it is going to be like?”

“Karl’s got a thing about chai,” said Joz. “He loves taking women – usually tall ones – to drink chai.”

“Well,” said Karl, “you can always see women, but how often can you have a South Bank chai latte?”

Joz Norris is not always seeing women; Karl joined Tinder

“I’m not always seeing women,” said Joz.

“I joined Tinder,” said Karl, “mainly because I felt bad about not doing enough out-of-town gigs. I got into comedy to travel, but I don’t really travel much, other than Edinburgh and China.”

“China?” I said, surprised.

“I went to China a couple of years ago. Did a cabaret out there. In hindsight, I should not have been invited.”

“Anyway,” I said, “on Tinder…”

“I’ve been to Southampton and Penrith,” said Karl. “When I went to Southampton, I got to see where Craig David went to school. I had to do it at the weekend. You can’t do it in the week, because they will move you on.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Well you can’t,” said Karl, “just go snooping on Craig David’s former secondary school during the week. People will say: What’s he doing?”

“Fair point,” said Joz.

“What happened in Penrith?” I asked. “Did you get a booking at a local comedy club?”

“Free lodgings and a lovely breakfast,” said Karl. “I had curry for breakfast.”

“The other day,” said Joz, “I had left-over lamb biryani for breakfast.”

“So you got into comedy to travel?” I asked. “But there were other things you could have done. Like become a bus driver.”

“We went to Lake Windermere,” said Karl. “Dove Cottage: Wordsworth’s cottage. You know they always had tiny beds…”

“Yeah,” said Joz.

“Did you really?” I asked him.

Joz shrugged.

“But,” continued Karl, “the part where your head would be was at 45 degrees. That’s why beds were shorter. They believed that demons or ghosts might visit you in the night and, if they saw you almost upright, they might think you were awake and go away.”

“It stops acid reflux too,” I said. “Sitting up in bed.”

“Yesterday,” said Karl, “I thought I was having a heart attack.”

“I had it for the first time about a year ago,” I said. “Acid reflux. It really is like you have acid inside your tubes.”

“Is that how you spontaneously combust?” asked Joz.

“No,” I said.

“Too many eggs,” said Karl.

“The Elephant Man had to sleep sitting up,” said Joz, “because of his huge head… Seriously. I was in the play in 2003; I played the man at the fair.”

“I was intending to do a fairly serious chat with you,” I said.

Karl as his character ‘Matthew Kelly’ with some Chinese fans

“We could do that,” said Karl. “Someone said watching me be happy as my Matthew Kelly character was like watching a crocodile. The character has a calm exterior, but my eyes were very violent. So it was like a crocodile smile.”

“You can hold a crocodile’s mouth shut,” said Joz. “The muscles that open its mouth are very weak, so you can touch the sides and hold the mouth shut.”

“Or use a rubber band,” said Karl.

“Aren’t you supposed to hit them on the nose?” I asked.

“That’s sharks,” said Joz.

“Lick its eyes,” said Karl. “That’s what a zebra does. I saw a video of a crocodile being licked by a zebra. A crocodile hasn’t evolved a natural defence against having its eyes licked.”

“Nor have I,” said Joz.

There is a video on YouTube of a zebra briefly licking a crocodile’s eyes then escaping.

“That’s how you can get away from Joz,” suggested Karl. “Lick his eyes.”

“No-one’s ever tried that,” said Joz. “Mostly, they just say No… I heard that the way to get away from a crocodile is to run in zig-zags, because they can’t move in zig-zags.”

“Or just keep out of Africa and away from the water,” I suggested.

“And Asia,” said Joz. “And America.”

“And zoos,” I suggested.

“London Zoo is so depressing,” said Karl. “They haven’t even got the grey animals now; they’ve moved them all up to Whipsnade Zoo.”

“Grey?” I asked.

“The elephants and rhinos,” said Karl.

“Do they only keep all the colourful ones in London?” I asked.

“They’ve still got the tiger,” said Karl.

“Earlier this year,” said Joz, “I went to London Zoo on a date and I made the girl film me doing an impression of Nelson Mandela all the way round  the zoo.”

“Sounds questionable,” I said.

“It was for a sketch,” explained Joz.

Never ever take ketamine wearing a lion mask at London Zoo

“The first time I went back to London Zoo since I was a kid,” said Karl, “I went with my mate and bought some masks and took ketamine. It was a terrible afternoon. I was in a really bad place.”

“It’s terrible stuff,” agreed Joz.

“He was a giraffe and I was a lion,” said Karl. “Ketamine is the worst drug ever.”

“Well don’t take it,” I said.

“I don’t any more. Have you heard of K-holing? It describes the completely stark, cataclysmic trip of… It’s awful…”

“What’s your idea of heaven?” I asked.

“Taking a tall Ghanaian woman to Lake Windermere,” said Karl.

… CONTINUED HERE …

Anna says that, nowadays, she tries her best to remain incognito

Yesterday’s blog was about the current Save Soho! campaign.

This blog’s occasional Canadian correspondent Anna Smith used to work in Soho.

Last night, she told me in an e-mail:

“I enjoyed the song about Soho. The Gargoyle/Nell Gwynn club at 69 Dean Street is where I met nearly all the people who befriended me in London. It was the first place I went to look for work and I got hired immediately and then found spots in the surrounding clubs.

“In Canada we mostly worked at clubs for one week at a time but in Soho, at most clubs, we did one show at a set time and then basically the job went on forever. It seemed like some of the Gargoyle girls had been there for decades! Some seemed to have done the same show for years.

Anna spent many years in very rude health

“I spent so many years being a pretend nurse that, to this day, I refer to nurses as ‘real nurses’. I remember one exhausted looking woman dressed like a French maid who looked so bored, clomping in platform heels clockwise and then counter clockwise. She could barely be bothered to lift her feather duster. The men did not usually applaud, being busy with their rain coats.”

Anna now lives in Vancouver, somewhere I increasingly think of as a hotbed of oddities.

“Last week on the bus,” she told me, “I saw an octegenarian lady start punching a young man who had offered her a seat on the bus.  She was wearing a long pink plaid skirt, an emerald green beret and carrying a nice cloth New York Public Library bag. People on the bus, including me, comforted the skinny, shaken young man and assured him he had done nothing wrong.

“Meanwhile, adult education is developing at a good pace here. At a meeting last night I learned that local sex workers have been training the Vancouver Police Department as well as selected urology nurses – not in the same room though.

“We also learned about the situation in Arizona, where we were told there is apparently a new law to prevent ‘self rape’.

“Everybody looked confused and asked what that meant.

“A woman explained it is what morbidly Christian Arizona calls masturbation. She said the first person charged under the new law was a teenage boy whose mother called the police when she caught him wanking. The boy was 15 when it happened on 15th November this year and is now in jail facing a three to thirteen year sentence.”

Anna looked further into the boy facing prison for self-rape, which turned up in a National Report online.

She found that “if you Google ‘Paul Horner’ there are links to that name associated with Banksy and the same name has been used in other hoaxes.”

An ideal Christmas gift from Stop Masturbation Now group

Sadly, too, a Queerty website report that, in the US, the Stop Masturbation Now organisation – which claims to be dedicated to “educating the world about the dangers of self-rape” and which has an extensive website – has begun marketing an anti-masturbation cross for your self-loved one at the bargain price of $199… is an elaborate joke.

But it is good to know that well-planned and backgrounded cunning stunts are alive and well in the Colonies.

Adam’s show in memory of the iconic comic Malcolm Hardee

Yesterday, at the Soho Theatre in London, I talked to comic Elf Lyons for a future blog.

Then I was due to talk to showman Adam Taffler about a show he is arranging at Up The Creek in Greenwich to mark the 10th anniversary of Malcolm Hardee’s death by drowning.

“Is it confirmed yet?” I asked him.

“Yes, Monday 2nd February at Up The Creek,” he said.

Then comic John Robertson appeared.

John Robertson (left) be-hatted with Adam Taffler yesterday

“Bloodshot eyes at the window,” said John Robertson.

I have no idea what this means, but he and Adam started discussing their hats.

“I was just talking to Elf Lyons,” I said. “She always wears a hat. She said I would look good in a Panama hat.”

“A Panama with your usual Hawaiian shirts would look good,” agreed Adam.

“Elf asked what you do,” I told Adam. “And I couldn’t explain. Bits and pieces of everything.”

“I’m doing a Burns Night at the end of this month,” he said. “We’re going to do a ceilidh – a Scottish Independence Referendum dance. You get everyone who was for Yes on the right and everyone who was for No on the left and you get them to dance together. It will be really funny.”

“It needs a punchline,” I said.

“It does,” said John Robertson.

“I don’t do punchlines,” laughed Adam, “I am an artist.”

“Where is the Burns Supper?” I asked.

Adam’s Burns Baby Burns! without monks

“In the ecclesiastical colosseum of St John’s at Hackney.”

“Do they have monks fighting in Hackney?” I asked.

“One of Henry VIIII’s mistresses is buried there,” said Adam.

“You have to admire his stamina,” I said. “Six wives and multiple mistresses. Why are you suddenly doing Burns Nights?”

“I love ceilidhs,” said Adam.

“This will not help me explain to Elf Lyons what you do,” I suggested.

“I am,” said Adam, “just making it up as I go along.”

“He is a human dynamo,” said John Robertson. “He is a pathfinder.”

“He is a man with a false moustache,” I said.

“It’s real,” said Adam. “I am a midwife to people’s dreams.”

“It could be a real moustache with a false man,” said John Robertson. “But this is getting like a Philip K Dick novella.”

And with that, like Keyser Söze, John Robertson left without a limp.

“Are we talking about your date with a person from the media?” I asked Adam.

He had told me that, after seeing me, he had a romantic assignation.

“It is a silent date,” he replied.

One of Adam’s many business ventures is a series of regular Shhh Dating events where people, in effect, do speed dating with each other but without saying any words.

Adam told me this would be the first sight his date would see

“Why are you having a silent date?” I asked.

“I dunno.,” said Adam. “I just thought it would be fun.”

“This is after your Free Love period?” I asked.

“Not Free Love,” said Adam. “The Sex Positive scene I was getting to know a little bit.”

“It sounds like Free Love to me,” I told him.

“It’s just another form of creativity,” said Adam. “Oh!!! That will sound so shit in your blog!”

“Things do,” I said. “In print, ‘Sex Positive’ may sound like a randy man with a false moustache going round knobbing people.”

“It’s a real moustache,” said Adam.

“I have to go to the toilet,” I told him. “Alone. I will leave my phone recording.”

While I was away, Adam talked to my iPhone.

“John thinks I might say something interesting now,” Adam told my iPhone, “but actually I have nothing to say. That is the reason I don’t perform stand-up comedy. But I do do other things like ceilidh dancing and nudie dancing in the moonlight.”

When I came back, Adam told me: “So, this summer, I got invited by my friend who runs an event called the Summer House Party. It is about 300 adults from the Sex Positive scene. It’s like a mini Burning Man. There are loads of different creative things. You can hang-out, do face-painting, do hot tubs and it builds to this big event on the Saturday night and there’s a playroom and I don’t know if we should talk about this, John.”

“It will be in print forever,” I agreed.

“It might sound wrong,” said Adam. “It’s such a sweet thing but might sound dodgy… OK… I went along to the Summer House Party and I was running some of these Shhh Dating workshops and it was great fun and, on Saturday night, there was a big party and, in one room at the party, there were lots of people having sex with each other… So it was like any normal party, really.

“What I want to say is it was really creative and artistic and human, but I suppose you could say that about dogging. What it looks like to me is there’s this whole spectrum of sexuality all the way from dogging and… what’s that other one where you fuck and never see them again?”

“Sheep worrying,” I suggested.

“Maybe,” said Adam. “But this is more like you form friendships and hang-out together. Sex Positive means exploring sexuality and doing it safely. But there’s another thing which I’m starting to understand a bit now… about gender identity. In this scene, you’re not supposed to refer to someone as a He or a She or a Man or a Woman until you ask them first, because there’s a lot of transgender people in the community and some of them got really upset. People are saying: Let’s throw away the whole notion of gender. It’s so passé. So that’s kind of interesting.”

“This is going to sound a bit Californian in print,” I said.

“It is, I guess,” said Adam.

“Anyway,” I said, “earlier, you told me you had now decided to be more into single relationships.”

Adam limbering up for his silent date in London last night

“That’s right,” said Adam. “This summer I had the whole awakening of this scene and meeting lots of different people and exploring lots of different things but, actually, I think I prefer to have a deeper relationship with one person.”

“And this media person you are seeing tonight is female?” I asked.

“Yes, I date women. I’m not homosexual.”

“Animals?” I asked.

“Only squirrels,” said Adam.

“And professionally?” I asked.

“I’m just trying to survive and build. I’m trying to do things that excite me and it excites me to have a room of 500 people dancing or feasting or having sex. In a good way. Or squirrels. Or to take artists and ask them what they ACTUALLY want to be doing and then to make that happen. That also excites me.

“I don’t want to do a normal job,” said Adam. “and the things I’ve done before are coming back again this year and getting better and some really cool people are starting to ask me if I want to work with them. Which is great. I like interesting experiences. How boring is that as a sentence in your blog? I wanna touch people. That’s what I wanna do. It could be in a show, in their brain. That’s what excites me. And, again, that’s probably going to look terrible in print. But I’m doing stuff and it’s fun.”

With that, Adam went off to have his silent date with a media person and I went off to see the Kinks’ musical Sunny Afternoon with my eternally-un-named friend.

Last night I saw Sunny Afternoon & remembered drunk Kinks

Our last two theatrical excursions together - Charles III and Great Britain – were not triumphs, but things are getting better. We saw a preview of Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper at the weekend – I thought it had surprising depth; she said it was OK. And Sunny Afternoon could not really go wrong with Ray Davies’ songs and an exuberant (I thought slightly over-directed) production.

I saw The Kinks perform a couple of times in London in the 1970s. They started off slightly dull but, after about 10 or 20 minutes, they appeared to get drunk and were absolutely superb.

My eternally-un-named friend told me she thought Sunny Afternoon was: “Fantastic! Possibly lose the thrust stage as unnecessary and distracting. But fantastic singing, dancing, costumes and – literally – swinging from the chandelier. Fantastic!”

After the show, in the walkway from Charing Cross station to Hungerford Bridge, I looked ahead and saw Adam Taffler walking towards me. It turned out, in his youth, he had known Kink Dave Davies’ son.

“How did the date go?” I asked. “Did you manage to keep totally silent?”

“For the first 40 minutes,” he said. “We ordered a bottle of wine without talking.”

“How?” I asked.

“I wrote it on a Post-it note.”

“That’s cheating,” I said.

Adam Taffler on his return from a successful romantic silence

“It was great,” said Adam. “It was fun. She found it a bit difficult at first and we had a 5-minute talking break, but we broke that initial bullshit of This is who I am and this is what I do. We got to know each other really well through not talking to each other and the rest of it was just a dream. We’re going to date again next week. She’s a really intelligent, lovely girl.”

The 2004 Norwegian Cumshots gig coupling that started it off

Yesterday afternoon, my eagle-eyed Facebook friend and anonymous Edinburgh Fringe Scarlet Pimpernel figure Garry Platt sent me the link to a 2004 article headlined:

COUPLE HAS SEX ON STAGE AT NORWEGIAN MUSIC FESTIVAL: PHOTOS AVAILABLE

The story was that, at the Quart Festival, during a performance by Norwegian ‘death’n’roll’ band The Cumshots, a couple of activists from the suitably-named conservation group Fuck For Forest had got on stage and done what you would expect two activists from a group with that name would do.

This had happened back in 2004, but the names The Cumshots and Fuck For Forest – as well as the incident itself – rang familiar bells at the back of my mind.

“Bob Slayer!” the bells chimed at the back of my mind.

This 2004 sex-on-stage incident was actually mentioned obliquely in a blog of mine in 2013.

Peace-loving chap Bob Slayer on his mobile phone last night

So I Skyped Bob last night on his mobile phone and of course, almost inevitably, he had just come back from Norway.

Before leaping full-time into comedy performing and promoting, he used to be in the music business. One of his many enterprises was managing Japanese rock band Electric Eel Shock.

“In 2004,” he told me, “I was at that Quart Festival and The Cumshots came to see Electric Eel Shock the night before it happened. They kept telling me: You must come and see our show tomorrow! But we had to leave early the next morning to play a festival in Denmark. The Cumshots wouldn’t tell me what, but I knew they were up to something and, a week later, sure enough, I read in Kerrang! magazine: NORWEGIAN BAND FINED FOR LETTING A COUPLE HAVE SEX ON STAGE.”

The Quart festival organisation was reportedly fined 50,000 NOK (look, that’s the currency; it is nothing to do with me) and the band members were fined 10,000 NOK each.

You can see The Cumshots’ toe-tapping Praying For Cancer on YouTube.

“Kristopher Schau, the lead singer of The Cumshots,” Bob told me yesterday, “is a really interesting guy. As well as being in The Cumshots, he’s been on TV shows. He even had his own TV show based on the Seven Deadly Sins. In one of the episodes, he lived in a shop window for a month without washing – though I’m not sure what exact sin that is. And, in another episode, he was circumcised and ate his foreskin.

“He is a thinking man’s Jackass. It’s nonsense and weird but there’s thought and statements and I’ve watch some of his stuff with sub-titles and it’s fascinating.”

“What,” I asked, “is the philosophical depth of eating your own foreskin?”

“There is one,” Bob told me definitively. “And the Cumshots are part of a really interesting collective of Norwegian bands – Duplex Records – which is very influential. It includes bands like Hurra Torpedo, Black Debbath and Thulsa Doom.

“Kristopher Schau, the singer of The Cumshots is the drummer for Hurra Torpedo and the Cumshots’ guitarist Ole Petter Andreassen is the drummer for Black Debbath. There are five or six bands and they swap around and they’re all really interesting.”

“Not traditional rock bands?” I asked.

“Hurra Torpedo do have a guitar but, apart from that, all their other instruments are appliances like washing machines. In your blog, you MUST link to their cover of Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of The Heart. It is fantastic.”

Who am I to say nay Bob Slayer? Here it is on YouTube…

“So,” I asked Bob yesterday. “The couple who actually had sex on stage… Tommy Hol Ellingsen and Leona Johansson…?”

“They made porn,” explained Bob, “and wanted to sell that porn to make money to save the rainforests. But, when they tried to donate the money, charities told them: We don’t want your dirty porn money.

“So they moved to Brazil, to the rainforests, to set up their own projects, which had the knock-on effect that the value of their porn went up. They now fuck IN the forest to SAVE the forest. I haven’t Googled them recently to see if they are still going.

“I find these people really inspiring, because they are… That is a truly alternative thing to do…”

“I get the impression,” I said, “that you’ve been to Norway quite a lot. Why were you over there this weekend just past?”

Bob being Bob (left) at the Slottsfjell Festival in Norway, 2014

“For the Crap åppå Park Comedy Festival.”

“Ah,” I said.

“It’s their fifth year,” said Bob, “and it’s grown and grown. Now it’s a week long.

“I’ve gigged all round Norway on the back of getting banned by the Latter Theatre in Oslo, which is basically the Jongleurs of Norway.”

“Remind me?” I said.

“Two years ago, I was performing three nights in Latter.  After the first two nights, they asked me to calm down and the third night I WAS going to calm down but they made two mistakes.

“One was that, in the afternoon, the local newspaper had us sampling Christmas beers. They gave us a bucket and said: You can spit into that.

“I said: I’m not spitting beer into a bucket. I want to drink from that bucket. So I got drunk.”

“And the second mistake?” I asked.

“In the audience that night, were The Cumshots and a guy who makes the stage props for the black metal band Mayhem – they’re the ones who killed each other and ate each others brains and now they put pigs’ heads on stage.

“My friend Spacebrain was in the audience and I thought: (a) I’m a bit drunk and (b) I can’t do a Jongleurs or Latter type gig to The Cumshots.

“So I didn’t do the calmed-down set I had been thinking of. Instead, I came off the balcony on a rope, threw fruit at the audience as I came down the rope, went on stage, pulled out a bottle of Jägermeister, drank most of that, talked about The Cumshots and… well, it was the Jägermeister was ultimately why I got banned.

Bob (left), naked atop Norwegian caravan… Things happen…

“How illegal is that in Norway? – Having a bottle on stage and pouring it? It’s very illegal. And then, when a guy said: That can’t be real Jägermeister, I poured some for this guy in the front row. Handing out free drinks to the audience is… not allowed either.

“Then, as I handed the guy in the front row the Jägermeister, I saw he was in a wheelchair. He drank it and said: Oh yeah. That’s real Jägermeister! and I said: Yes, mate. And you’ve got more chance of walking out of this gig than I have.

“When they banned me for going mental and illegal drinking, they also told me: What you said to that man in the wheelchair was not acceptable. 

“I asked: Why? Did he complain? and they said: No, but he could have done.

“I asked: What was the guy in the wheelchair’s name? and they said: It’s irrelevant.

“I said, No, his name is Lars. And I pulled out my camera and showed them photos of me and Lars drinking after the show, me and Lars and The Cumshots drinking, Lars rolling around in the road and me doing laps of honour round him in his own wheelchair and him laughing like a drain.”

“And now,” I asked Bob, “you get gigs in Norway BECAUSE you got banned?”

“I didn’t get banned this weekend, despite nearly killing someone.”

“You didn’t?” I asked.

“I did feed someone a banana and he did turn out to be allergic to bananas,” explained Bob.

“I read,” I said, “that you are running comedy at the Melbourne Comedy Festival.”

“Yes,” said Bob.“It’s their first festival in Melbourne, Derbyshire, but already they can proudly boast it’s the second biggest  Melbourne Comedy Festival in the world.”

“Have you been banned in the other Melbourne?” I asked, “or was that only in Perth?”

“I’ve never been to the other Melbourne,” said Bob.

“And you’re putting on shows in The Hive at the Edinburgh Fringe this year?” I asked.

“… and I’m working on building a mobile venue,” replied Bob.

“Poor Edinburgh,” I said. “Just when they thought they were safe.”

There is a ‘trailer’ on YouTube which gives a fair idea of the Fuck For Forest philosophy.

After reading yesterday’s blog about live sex on-stage at a rock festival in Norway, this blog’s occasional correspondent Anna Smith sent me the following from Vancouver.

Anna Smith: woman with a past

It’s not that unusual for people to have sex in the forest here. It’s a bit less crowded than the beach.

Most of British Columbia is conveniently covered in forest. Forestry is a major industry, it may even provide more jobs than massage parlours, but not as many as the marijuana plantations. Work in the orchards, fishing and mushroom-picking industries is more seasonal. Tree planting, logging, sawmills, pulp & paper and forest fires provide a lot of work year round and excitement every summer. Fire fighters pour in from across the continent, livening up small towns and dumping toxic water bombs from helicopters onto burning railway trestles to the delight of intoxicated teenage ferry passengers.

I have always turned down any job that involves having sex on stage. So I did find it hilarious that, when I was dancing in the Belgian Porno cinemas (which was not quite the same thing as the Belgian Congo, although the cinemas could be described as conflict zones), the signs outside the cinemas advertised Live Sex Show but it was just me doing a striptease. We had to sign lengthy contracts in quadruplicate stating that, if we were performing with wild animals or on the trapeze, we were responsible for our own insurance.

Anna’s father sounds interesting. She also sent me this:

A photo taken last night of Anna Smith, “after three days of sleeping on a psychiatrist’s couch, not wearing any make-up.”

My father is asleep right now, which I am glad of as he has a large hole on the top of his head. He looks like he has been hit by shrapnel and I am very glad he did not remove his cap at the concert on Saturday, although he did threaten to.

His friend, a languages professor from Manchester, pleaded that he not remove his cap.

I asked the professor: “What’s the matter? Don’t you have a hole in your head?”

He said he did not, so I asked him where he did have holes – a question which did not displease him.

We were in a church. There was an announcement over the PA system that someone had left their headlights on and that they should be turned off.

My father pretended that it was an announcement that someone had left their cap on and, again, threatened to remove his.

After the concert, we noticed two spooky effigies against the wall. One represented a refugee and the other a homeless person with angel’s wings.

I have no explanation for the above.

The ever interesting Anna Smith

Three days ago, I ran a piece in which Anna Smith, this blog’s occasional Canadian correspondent, described thinking she had experienced an earthquake.

She later noticed that one of the ‘Likes’ on that blog was from an anonymous other blogger who mentioned bookstores and Baltimore.

“I hoped for a minute,” she told me, “that it was film director John Waters… But no, it doesn’t appear to be him. In a recent Globe and Mail article, Waters was lamenting the demise of the porn cinema – He is hosting a series showing ten classic porn films.

“He observed that when people went (to a cinema) to view porn films it used to be a social activity whereas now, although there is a limitless variety of subject matter available, it has become a solitary experience. Having danced in porn cinemas on three continents I have to say that I am also sad to see them go. John Waters said that most of the ones in the U.S.A. have been turned into churches.”

Now, I have been around an awfully long time and I do remember old-style porn cinemas, but I don’t think I was ever in one.

Actually, that may not be true: I may have bizarrely seen a screening of BBC TV’s then-banned documentary The War Game in a porn cinema near Piccadilly Circus.

There were only ever two porn films which appealed to me.

One was She Lost Her You-Know-What because it was billed as ‘based on a story by Alexandre Dumas’, which I found intriguing. I can find no trace of this movie at all, but I swear-to-god I saw it advertised when I was reviewing films for (I think at that time) the International Times.

The title caption for the little-remembered 1973 porn movie

The other porn film which appealed to me certainly exists: a 1973 UK/German short called Snow White and the Seven Perverts (Schneeflittchen unter die Sieben Bergen – which Google Translate confusingly reckons literally means Snow Hussy Among The Seven Mountains).

My understanding is that the Walt Disney company threatened to sue the film-makers, rather dubiously claiming copyright on the title Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs (surely a Brothers Grimm original?), so the producers then re-titled their magnum opus Some Day My Prince Will Come.

I thought: These producers are creatively interesting.

Anyway, the concept of having live dancers perform in a porn cinema sounded to me unnecessarily spendthrift for presumably very financial sensible porn cinema entrepreneurs. So I asked Anna Smith for her expert knowledge on the subject.

“It was around the time when VCRs first appeared.” she told me. “For the first time, people could watch porn movies at home. So the porn cinemas were desperate to get their audiences back and brought in live dancers, who were billed as ‘feature acts’.

Snow White - not the Disney version. Maybe a bit Grimm

“I first danced in cinemas in Toronto and really enjoyed it… It was the first time I got to dance in a place where there was no smoking. Also, it was a theatre setting rather than a nightclub, so the audiences were not drunk and were more attentive. Our pictures appeared in newspaper ads, our names were on the marquees and some places even had graphic artists who painted our names on lobby cards.”

So there you have it: a little-remembered part of social history involving porn cinemas.

Copstick et moi record the Grouchy Club Podcast yesterday

Yesterday, Kate Copstick and I recorded our sixth Grouchy Club Podcast at her Mama Biashara charity shop in Shepherd’s Bush, London.

Amid talk of sex and a Manchester Hotel which used to be a brothel, the subject of comedian Lewis Schaffer’s sex appeal came up.

COPSTICK

… and he’s looking well. Even since he stopped dying his hair.

Lewis Schaffer with his dyed hair – even then a heart-throb?

JOHN

Ah, now… Sex and Lewis Schaffer and his hair. I think it makes him look older and therefore less attractive I would have thought – I don’t know, but…

COPSTICK

No. He’s become a bit of a silver fox, don’t you think?

JOHN

Women keep telling me he’s more attractive with his grey hair. I would have thought, if you’re a stand-up comedian, you have to be young.

COPSTICK

With Lewis and the jet-black hair, there was a definite hint of Lenny Beige.

It’s not Lewis Schaffer – It’s Lenny Beige

JOHN

(LAUGHING) For people who don’t know Lenny Beige, he was a sort-of fake lounge lizard comedian.

COPSTICK

(IN AMERICAN ACCENT) Fantastic! With more or less the same accent as Lewis Schaffer. A funny, funny man.

JOHN

But fake. As, indeed, is Lewis because, of course, he’s from Birmingham.

COPSTICK

Of course… And he’s not a failure.

JOHN

Well yes. Poor old Lewis Schaffer, who’s made his entire reputation out of being a failure and having a show called…

COPSTICK

He’s been on the (BBC Radio 4) Today programme, for fucksake!

JOHN

I know. His show was called Free Until Famous and now he’s charging a tenner (£10) in Edinburgh to get in and a tenner in Leicester Square for the last god knows how long.

Lewis Schaffer in his weekly Leicester Square Theatre show International Man of Misery

COPSTICK

Where’s he going to? That’s the thing. If you build a career on failure, when you start to succeed, where do you go?

JOHN

Upwards. He’s going to fail at being a failure, therefore he’s going to go upwards. Most people fail at being a success and go downwards.

COPSTICK

But then is he going to be able to get away with stumbling on stage and just talking shit for an hour?

JOHN

Well, yes. It’s very interesting shit he talks. Did you see the video of the Today programme? That was interesting.

COPSTICK

There are videos of the Today programme?

JOHN

They seem to have some sort of webcam up in the corner.

COPSTICK

That’s very modern of them. With John Humphries?

Lewis Schaffer on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme in March

JOHN

They had a webcam and someone gave the link to Lewis and he put it online on Facebook and he looked really good on camera. John Humphries was in the corner shuffling papers, because it wasn’t his serious item. But Lewis looked really good on television. He would be really good on television documentaries. He’s not a stand-up comedian because he can’t replicate the act phrase-for-phrase, pause-for-pause in rehearsals, dress rehearsals and the take. But he’d be very good on like My View of Britain. It would be like Letter From America with Alistair Cooke.

COPSTICK

He does… He chunters… He’s a bit like Phil Kaye, who can be absolutely genius on stage or can be What the fuck was all that about? And that sort of thing is very difficult to capture on television because you are time constrained on television. When someone rambles the way Phil or Lewis rambles, it’s not rambling in a way you can chop down to make something succinct.

JOHN

You need nerves of steel as a producer and just let it go. I was in the audience at London Weekend for the first episode of a Michael Barrymore series and they kept interrupting the show to say to Michael that he had gone off script and they kept putting him back on script, which was completely mad. You want to let him loose, hope for the best, have nerves of steel and have a very good director who can edit…

At the time of posting, the BBC website has a video clip of Lewis Schaffer on the Today programme.

Poster for this month’s Pull The Other One

It will become obvious as this blog progresses why there are maybe fewer illustrations than normal.

Yesterday I was talking to Martin Soan of the Greatest Show on Legs, who also runs London’s monthly Pull The Other One comedy club.

The Greatest Show on Legs are performing two shows at London’s Comedy Cafe Theatre this month and also doing a special performance during the Malcolm Hardee Comedy Awards Show on the last Friday of the Edinburgh Fringe in August.

But Martin also makes props for other acts.

“Have you had any orders for anything at the Edinburgh Fringe this year?” I asked him.

Martin Soan, master maker of stage genitalia

“It’s a bit early,” he told me. “They usually start coming in panicking about a month before the Fringe starts. Then I get a flurry of requests. And I do a lot of consultation. People ring me up and want things and I tell them: This is the way you can do it cheaper. Have you thought about buying this or that? I talk people through how to make their own props. So I get a lot of consultation for which I get paid absolutely nothing.”

‘You’ll have to start charging this year,” I suggested.

“The thing is people approach me so late,” said Martin. “It’s usually so late I only have time to do things for a couple of people. This year, I can only do a couple cos I’ve got a lot of work on myself.”

“Last weekend,” I prompted, “you were in Omid Djalili’s two shows over two nights at the Hammersmith Apollo.”

“Yes, and the Watford Colosseum on the Thursday night. I got a couple of messages from Omid a couple of weeks before the shows, asking me if I could make some spinning testicles for him.”

“What size were they?”

“Slightly larger than normal. Malcolm Hardee sized bollocks.’

“Oh,” I said, “so they were not like 3ft wide bollocks? How did people see them in a vast theatre?”

“I made the colour of the trousers contrast with the colour of the testicles,” explained Martin. “It went down a storm, so presumably everyone could see it.

“In the show, Omid was sitting with his dad in front of the television and they have this ridiculous pastime – they stick their hands down their trousers and sort of wind each other up by seeing how many times they can twist their bollocks round. So they’ve got it up to five and Omid wanted someone to go on stage at the end of the show, get hold of their own bollocks, twist them round six times then let go and they go whirrr-whirrr-whirrr spinning round like that.

“It was a really difficult prop to make because, obviously, the testicles had to be right close to your own testicles and, obviously, he wanted not just testicles but an appendage to feature as well.

“So I had to research penises and stuff like that in the dark world of sexual applications and I eventually got a silicon penis. It was just really difficult to make it work. The testicles had to look fairly realistic immediately although presumably – once they started spinning round – everyone would realise they were not real.

“The silicon penis made it so difficult, because I had the spinning shaft and only had about 4 centimetres to play with – to motorise it or bungee-rubber-band it up. It was a really difficult prop to make. In the end, the only way to do it was with my own real penis.

“So I showed Omid a little video of it and he was really happy with the prop.

“First of all, he had a member of his family lined-up to do it and they thought it was fantastic up until the point when he described what happens. Then his father got really angry with him and refused to do it. Then he had two really famous people lined-up to do it. They thought it was very, very funny until he explained the actual end of the routine and they both refused to do it. So then he told me I had to do it.”

“And,” I asked, “did it work sensibly?”

“It worked,” laughed Martin. “Not sensibly!”

“How many genitalia props have you made?” I asked.

“Over the years for Edinburgh Fringe shows,” mused Martin. “I would say about ten. Some of them I might have forgotten. It might be a dozen. Over the last maybe five years, I’ve had two or three requests.

“The worst thing is having to do the research. To get the silicon penis for Omid, I had to go on all these sexual paraphernalia sites and you just get fed up with it and then you get loads of spam mail afterwards asking if you want all these weird dildos and things. It’s a pain in the arse.”

“Not what I would have thought,” I said,

“The worst one,” Martin told me, “was for Pete Jonas, who wanted a human-sized female genitalia.”

“How big?”

“About six or eight-feet tall.”

“That,” I said, “is bigger than the human ones I’ve seen.”

“I said human-sized,” explained Martin, “not life-sized.

“I had to do a bit of research – I wanted to get it anatomically correct – and, when I started looking, it was amazing. It really opened my eyes up about the wonderful array of female genitalia that is out there. Not any two are the same. I think most men’s penises are basically the same… or maybe two types – circumcised and non-circumcised – and then the other variation is the size, of course. But female genitalia? It’s a myriad of different styles.

‘Then, after doing the in-depth research, I had to build this giant vagina and it had to talk – the lips had to move – and it had to have eyes that blinked as well.

“Pete Jonas didn’t pick it up for about three weeks. So I had it in my front room with my two daughters in the house and, every time I came in, it was a huge shock. In the end, it got rather wearing.”